by Paul Le Blanc
Cyril Lionel
Robert James (1901-1989) has begun to enjoy a revival among U.S. and European
intellectuals which promises to spread his influence more widely in the present
and future than was the case at any time during his life. He is best known for
his magnificent history of the Haitian revolution, entitled Black Jacobins
(first published in 1938 and reprinted often since then), but a growing number
of people are becoming increasingly familiar with many other facets of his work.
There has been a flood of works by
and about James since his death. There are now two biographies — one by
"new left" historian Paul Buhle, and a more recent product of Kent
Worchester's careful scholarship. A massive anthology of his writings, edited by
Anna Grimshaw, was glowingly reviewed in the New York Times. A fascinating
collection edited by Buhle and Paget Henry entitled C.L.R. James's Caribbean has
now been followed by a re-issue of his sports classic Beyond a Boundary.
Grimshaw and Keith Hart have also made available a major work by James, rich in
pioneering cultural analysis, entitled American Civilization. Professor Robert
Hill of the University of California at Los Angeles is projecting the
publication of the Collected Works of C.L.R. James over the coming years,
according to a front-page story in the Chronicle of Higher Education. An
important collection of essays by various scholars, edited by Selwyn Cudjoe and
William E. Cain, C.L.R. James, His Intellectual Legacies, has just appeared. The
Revolutionary Studies series of Humanities Press has recently republished his
1937 classic World Revolution (a history of the Communist International), has
published a volume edited by Scott McLemee and myself, entitled C.L.R. James and
Revolutionary Marxism, Selected Writings 1939-1949, and plans to bring out his
wonderful 1960 lectures Modern Politics in the near future.
James is
generally acknowledged to have been one of the most original Marxist thinkers to
emerge from the Western hemisphere, yet essential aspects of his identity came
from the other side of the Atlantic, from Europe and Africa. As he explained to
one African-American scholar, "I am a Black European, that is my training
and outlook." He offered penetrating analyses on the interrelationships of
class, race and gender, and his discussions of colonialism and anti- colonialism
could be brilliant. But C.L.R. James also embraced the heritage of the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the working-class and socialist
movements of Europe and North America, and the Bolshevism of Lenin and Trotsky
which transformed Russia and promised to liberate the world from all oppression.
At the same time, his writings on sports deserve special emphasis — which is
something that can be said of few Marxist theorists. James began his writing
career by writing about baseball's distant cousin, cricket, first in the West
Indies and later in England.
Paul Buhle,
following James, tells us that such sports are a means of "expression for
ordinary genius," adding that James regarded cricket as "a fully
fledged art form equal to theatre, opera and dance. To this claim James added a
populist amendment: 'What matters in cricket, as in all the finer arts, is not
the finer points but what everyone with some knowledge of the elements can see
and feel.' It embodied the elemental human movement which ... constituted the
basis and the source of renewal for all arts." (One can imagine that these
insights could also be applied to modern-day basketball, music videos on MTV,
and much else.) Such things — James felt— come from the same deeply creative
sources as more conventional great art and also as genuinely revolutionary
politics. The mass popular response to such things, similarly, has something in
common with the emotions and sensibilities associated with social revolutions,
in which masses of people creatively transform reality.
James's
Political Involvements
James moved to
England in 1932 from the West Indian island of Trinidad. In England he quickly
made contact with the British working-class movement, becoming part of the
radical Independent Labor Party and of a small Trotskyist organization within it
called the Marxist Group. He learned his Marxism within this context, and some
of his most enduring contributions to Marxism were made while he was part of the
Trotskyist movement in Britain and the United States. James also became involved
in the Pan-Africanist movement, becoming associated with such figures as George
Padmore, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah. In 1938
James helped to found the Fourth International, the world-wide organization of
revolutionary socialists, and was elected to its International Executive
Committee. In the same year he moved to the United States and became part of the
Socialist Workers Party. Frank Lovell has offered this recollection:
When C.L.R. James
came to this country from Britain, where he was a leader of the Trotskyist
movement, he was welcomed into the Socialist Workers Party and given leadership
responsibilities. James was an impressive speaker with his British accent and
his poise. He was a tall, handsome Black man... He spoke without notes, standing
aside from the podium on the speakers platform. It was as if he were a great
actor delivering a famous oration. At his first appearance he shared the
platform with [the top leaders of the SWP, Max] Shachtman and [James P.] Cannon
in the Irving Plaza meeting hall where Trotskyist meetings were often held.
Shachtman was the first speaker and was not brief. James came on next and even
though his talk was longer than Shachtman's, he completely captivated his
audience and received a big ovation. Cannon was the last speaker. Although he
was the national secretary of the party and had been announced for a major
speech, Jim had no intention of standing on his dignity or trying to hold the
audience so late at night in order to have his turn. He put aside his notes,
congratulated James on his speaking ability and welcomed him to the Socialist
Workers Party. [James P. Cannon As We Knew Him, ed. by Les Evans (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1976), pp. 138-139.]
James remained
part of the Trotskyist movement until 1951, adopting the party name "J.R.
Johnson." In 1940, when Shachtman and many others split from the SWP and
set up the rival Workers Party, James initially lined up with the Shachtmanites.
At the same time, along with an energetic theorist-in-the-making named Rae
Spiegel, later known as Raya Dunayevskaya, who took the party name "Freddie
Forest," James formed a very distinctive political current: the
Johnson-Forest tendency. The Johnson-Forest tendency, which never had more than
a few dozen adherents, mapped out an ambitious project for U.S. revolutionaries:
to develop an Americanized Marxism, and an Americanized Bolshevism, that would
involve a dynamic interpenetration of the U.S. and international revolutionary
traditions. This was to include intellectual efforts that have had an impact on
later scholars and social critics: the development of substantial analyses of
U.S. history, studies of modern culture (including a serious attitude toward
popular culture), historical and sociological labor studies, the development of
Marxist economic analysis, and an awesome embrace of dialectical materialism
which involved an immersion in the philosophical writings of Hegel. Among the
contributions of the Johnson- Forest tendency was to produce the first
English-language translation of Marx's important Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of the early 1840s.
Shachtman and
those who were close to Shachtman had little use for the Johnson-Forest
tendency, which attracted some of the more energetic young comrades and— among
other things- -sought to inspire them with the ambition to master the
complexities of Marx's Capital and Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind. As one
veteran of Shachtmanites later recalled: "You would see these 17 year olds
who could barely spell, and they were carrying Hegel." A one-time
Shachtmanite youth leader agreed: "In the youth group, with Hegel, they
would get up and start espousing Hegel, and it was utterly incoherent."
There were three other sins of the Johnson- Forest tendency that aggravated
Shachtman and his co-thinkers: 1) the position that the African- American
struggle, rather than being subsumed under the general struggle of the working
class, had a powerful dynamic of its own and would be central to the socialist
revolution in the U.S.; 2) the position that the American working class was far
more radical, having a greater revolutionary character, than many of the
Shachtmanites imagined; and 3) that the Socialist Workers Party of James P.
Cannon was much better than Shachtman and others were willing to admit, and that
the two groups should reunify.
This finally led
to a split from the Workers Party in 1947, and the Johnson-Forest group returned
to the SWP. While many SWPers were not inclined to accept much of the
Johnson-Forest theoretical output, and especially rejected the Johnson-Forest
notion that the Soviet Union was a "state-capitalist" society, the
tendency's members were seen as serious and hardworking revolutionaries. The
contributions that James had to make regarding the so-called "Negro
Question" were also highly valued. And yet disappointed hopes regarding the
failure of the U.S. working class to turn in a revolutionary direction, growing
difficulties and frustrations brought on by the Cold War and McCarthy periods,
and deepening political differences, caused James and his followers to leave the
SWP within five years. In doing this, they also openly rejected Trotskyism and
any commitments to building a Leninist-type party in the United States. Shortly
after this 1951 split, James— who was not a U.S. citizen— was arrested and
thrown out of the country because of his revolutionary politics. In 1955, Raya
Dunayevskaya and others split away to establish their own
"Marxist-Humanist" News and Letters group; in 1962 the Johnsonmites—
known by the name of their own paper Correspondence— suffered another split
led by James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs. James and his cothinkers regrouped
around the name "Facing Reality" (the title of a major Johnsonite
document). By the end of the 1960s, the remnants of the Facing Reality group
(led by James's close associate Marty Glaberman) decided to dissolve.
In the meantime,
however, two of James's proteges in other countries— Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana
and Eric Williams in Trinidad— assumed state power, and welcomed their
mentor's support and assistance. To a limited extent in Ghana, and to a much
greater extent in Trinidad, James contributed what he could— especially
important writings— to advance the revolutionary struggle. In both cases, he
was forced to break with the political course adopted by Nkrumah and Williams,
each in their own way veering off from the revolutionary-democratic and
socialist perspectives which he represented. In the final decades of his life,
James was able to see his influence grow in England, the United States, and in
the Caribbean among activists who were attracted to these revolutionary
perspectives.
James's Method
and Contributions
It would be wrong
to allow James to become— as has been done by some over the years— a cult
figure. He is not some sort of earthly deity whose judgments must be worshipped,
but a comrade from whom one can learn (sometimes even as one is challenging him
and clarifying a disagreement). Rather than offering criticisms or noting
contradictions in his ideas and work, I want to focus on certain of his
strengths and insights that I believe can be beneficial for the revolutionary
socialist movement. At the end of this presentation, however, I will touch on
one aspect of his thought which strikes me as somewhat problematical.
James's general
approach to reality seems to me to be very dynamic and exciting. An essential
aspect of his method is to make links between seemingly diverse realities,
sometimes to take something that is commonly perceived as being marginal and to
demonstrate that it is central, for example: the relation of the Haitian
Revolution to the French Revolution and later to the fortunes of Napoleon
Bonaparte; the relation of blacks to world history, Western civilization, and
the class struggle; the relation of popular culture— sports, movies, hit
songs, dancing, pulp fiction, comic books, etc.— to more "refined"
culture, to social realities and to class consciousness. James focuses on these
so-called "marginal" realities in a manner that profoundly alters
(rather than displacing) the traditionally "central" categories. The
attentive reader will find that such a methodological approach generates
innumerable fruitful challenges which help to move one's thinking forward on a
variety of issues.
Among James's
most substantial contributions was his assistance in making revolutionary
Marxists aware of the centrality of "the Negro Question" to the class
struggle and to any genuinely revolutionary perspective in the United States,
and I want to give major attention to that. First of all, he insistently
demonstrated that the history of blacks in the Americas was not simply a history
of poor victims of oppression, but of a vibrant and conscious people that found
innumerable ways to resist their oppression, assert their humanity, and
periodically struggle for their own liberation.
But James went
much further than this. On the basis of in-depth study and experience in black
communities of the United States, creatively utilizing Lenin's views on
oppressed nationalities, and in collaboration with Trotsky (with whom he had
extensive discussions in Mexico), James developed a profound theoretical
orientation to help guide the practical work of U.S. revolutionaries. "The
American Negroes, for centuries the most oppressed section of American society
and the most discriminated against, are potentially the most revolutionary
elements of the population," James explained in one resolution which he
wrote in 1939. "They are designated by their whole historical past to be,
under adequate leadership, the very vanguard of the proletarian
revolution." He added that "the broad perspectives of [Trotsky's
theory of] the permanent revolution will remain only a fiction" unless
revolutionary socialists could find their way to the African-American masses.
The implications of this were that a consistent, uncompromising struggle for the
democratic rights of African Americans (largely proletarianized) would
necessarily challenge bourgeois power and capitalism, with a potential for
growing over into a struggle for working-class power and socialism. Yet
James did not leave things at that.
A second
resolution noted that African Americans might feel moved, on the basis of their
own historic oppression, to advance the demand "for the establishment and
administration of a Negro state." He explained that "in a
revolutionary crisis, as they begin to shake off the state coercion and
ideological domination of the American bourgeois society, their first step may
well be to demand the control, both actual and symbolical, of their own
destiny."
Rejecting
schematic definitions having to do with whether blacks in the U.S. constituted
"a nation," James pointed out that "the raising or support of the
slogan by the masses of Negroes will be the best and only proof required."
Under such circumstances, revolutionary socialists should support the demand,
the realization of which could constitute, as James put it, a "step forward
to the eventual integration of the American Negroes into the United Socialist
States of America." James added: "The advocacy of the right of
self-determination does not mean advancing the slogan of self-determination. Self-determination
for Negroes means that Negroes themselves must determine their own future."
It is worth noting that there are, in fact, two meanings attached to the term
self-determination here. One meaning involves separation, setting up a
politically-distinct nation— which may or may not take place, depending on
what blacks themselves wish to do. The
other meaning involves the right of an oppressed people to define what they
shall be and to determine their own future— which, James insisted, must be a
constant principle for revolutionary Marxists.
He also observed
that "the awakening political consciousness of the Negro not unnaturally
takes the form of independent action uncontrolled by whites. The Negroes have
long felt, and more than ever feel today the urge to create their own
organizations under their own leaders and thus assert, not only in theory but in
action, their claim to complete equality with other American citizens. Such a
desire is legitimate and must be vigorously supported even when it takes the
form of a rather aggressive chauvinism." James's next point is of
particular interest: "Black chauvinism in America today is merely the
natural excess of the desire for equality and is essentially progressive while
white American chauvinism, the expression of racial domination, is essentially
reactionary."
This general
orientation was so advanced for its time that the SWP proved incapable of fully
assimilating it, and even today many socialists, even some who identify with
Trotskyism, don't accept it. But in the 1960s James's position provided a basis
for understanding the rising tide of militant struggles and nationalist
consciousness in the Black community. While these new developments proved to be
unexpected by and utterly confusing to many observers, Trotskyist analyst George
Breitman was able to draw on the earlier perspectives to provide a revolutionary
Marxist explanation. Especially important was Breitman's ability to highlight,
document and help popularize the profoundly revolutionary meaning of the ideas
and life of Malcolm X— which would have been impossible without the kind
of analysis pioneered by James a quarter of a century before. As
I have already indicated, James by no means confined himself to "the Negro
Question." His approach to the world around him was comprehensive,
multifaceted and penetrating. As a revolutionary interenationalist, he concerned
himself with revolutionary events in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa— and
also with the real struggles of working people and the oppressed in the United
States, in which he saw genuinely revolutionary qualities. There is a profound
continuity in how he viewed these struggles and the manner in which he defined
socialism. This comes through in this passage from a 1947 document of the
Johnson-Forest tendency entitled The Invading Socialist Society: The struggle
for socialism is the struggle for proletarian democracy. Proletarian democracy
is not the crown of socialism. It is its basis. Proletarian democracy is not the
result of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the
degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people,
the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a
self- acting force through its own committees, unions, parties and other
organizations.
An essential
aspect of James's approach is not that members of small revolutionary socialist
groups need to persuade the working class to become such a "self-acting
force." Rather, he insisted, the working-class already is such a force,
carrying out innumerable forms of resistance and struggle in everyday life in
their own workplaces and communities and personal lives which— while not
necessarily conforming to the blueprints and schemas of revolutionary socialist
groups, and often not noticed by these groups— effectively combat, undermine,
subvert capitalist power, creating elements of a new democratic-collectivist
society within the shell of the capitalist society around us.
In 1943 James
expressed this outlook in a brilliant polemic against Sidney Hook (a pioneering
post-Marxist whose 1943 volume The Hero in History is being echoed today in
fashionable ex- leftist critiques of Marxism and Leninism). Here James wrote
eloquently about the relationship between the working class and genuinely
revolutionary socialist groups. Noting that one aspect of Lenin's strength was
that he was an organic part of Russian culture, he went on to say:
As to the
outstanding role Lenin played inside his own party, even Marxist histories tend
to give it a false significance. Lenin
fought for the Bolshevik principles in 1903 and won. He was constantly winning,
which means that he expressed ideas which stood the test of practice. The
proletariat as a whole, at all critical moments, followed the Bolsheviks. More
important than this, however, is the fact that the Russian proletariat taught
and disciplined Lenin and the Bolsheviks not only indirectly but directly.
Basically the organization of the party paralleled the organization of the
productive power of the proletariat in revolution. In 1917, Lenin thought the
struggle hopeless, and was thinking of giving it up. A few weeks later came the
massacre of January, and the magnificent response of the Russian proletariat
revived the faltering leader. The proletariat created the soviets [democratic
workers' councils]. The Bolsheviks learned here to understand the vitality and
creative power of the proletariat in revolution.... The great change in policy
in April was only a manifestation of the essential policy of the Bolshevik
Party, to express and organize the instinctive desires and aims of the
proletariat.... The proletariat repeatedly led the Bolsheviks and gave Lenin
courage and wisdom. Between 1890 and 1921 the interrelation between leader,
party, class and nation was indivisible. The transformation of Bolshevism into
totalitarianism is adequately dealt with in the literature of Trotskyism. The
analysis is embodied in history, and the lessons are plain. With the proletariat
or against it, that is the future of every modern nation. The secret of Lenin's
greatness is that he saw this so clearly, and he saw this so clearly because
this choice was the inescapable product of the whole past of Russia....
We have here a
vision of revolutionary organizations being organically connected with the
history and culture of their own countries, and especially with their own
working classes, the insight that a revolutionary organization must be able to
learn from the working class if it hopes to be able to have anything to teach
the working class, that it must follow the workers in order to be able lead,
that the relationship between the revolutionary group and the working class must
be profoundly interactive.
A Challenge to
Revolutionary Marxists
Here I want to
turn to a problematical aspect of James's thought, which hopefully will provide
a challenging conclusion to this presentation. James never altered his analysis
of and admiration for Lenin and the Bolshevik party. But by the early 1950s he
discarded the conception of building a revolutionary vanguard party in the
United States because he felt this conception— as understood by most U.S.
Leninists— got in the way of cultivating the necessary interactive
relationship between revolutionary Marxists and the actually-existing,
self-acting working class. Also, he came to the conclusion that Trotsky and
other revolutionary Marxists had been wrong about believing that, after a
working-class revolution, a transitional period between capitalism and socialism
would be necessary. He felt that before the working class made its revolution it
would already have created— spontaneously, or semi-spontaneously, through its
own activity— democratic, collectivist, socialist relations through its
resistance to capitalist oppression. Even if the working class did not put a
"socialist" label on its own consciousness, activities, and
relationships, these were developing in a socialist direction within the very
framework of capitalist society, through the class struggle which— as noted in
the Communist Manifesto— is "now hidden, now open." The transition
to socialism, he felt, is taking place now in the consciousness and struggles of
working people in their workplaces and in their communities, and the transition
will be completed (not begun) by a working-class revolution.
I believe that
there are elements of truth in all of this, but that James took it too far.
Socialism is not inevitable. There
are countervailing tendencies— anti-socialist, anti-democratic, anti- humanist
tendencies— in our society, in our culture, and within the working class. The
genuinely revolutionary and socialist tendencies that James points to are there
in the consciousness, the struggles, and the everyday life of those who are part
of the working class. But these can become triumphant only to the extent that
they become conscious, are organized and mobilized- -and there are no guarantees
that this will happen on its own. Elements within the working class, including
people like ourselves, will need to work hard to help make it happen. To be
effective in this, we will need to organize ourselves, we will need to learn how
to work collectively and carry out coherent activities that contribute to the
growth of a working-class socialist movement, creating organizational structures
that can facilitate all of this. This means that, contrary to what James argued
in the 1950s and afterward, we will be moving to create a U.S. variant
of the Bolshevik-Leninist party.
As we do that,
however, we will be well served if we critically draw from the rich
contributions offered to us by our comrade C.L.R. James. There is much that
recommends him to us— his great intellectual breadth, which is reflected in
the quality of his Marxism, combining a serious concern with philosophy,
history, economics, culture, and practical political work. There is also his capacity to see things which aren't quite
"there" yet, but which are in the process of coming into being.
Related to this is his capacity to identify fruitful connections between
seemingly disparate phenomena, and his consequent ability to take what is
"peripheral" and show that it is, in fact, central to an adequate
understanding of politics and society. In addition, there is the deep humanism
which is essential to revolutionary Marxism but which James makes very much his
own, which opens to us a crucial insight: socialism is not something that is
simply thought up by brilliant intellectuals— it is an integral part of the
reality around us. Essential elements of it can be found in the thinking, the
perceptions, the values, the desires, the everyday life- activities, the many
ongoing struggles of the human beings who are part of the working-class
majority.
Writings of C.L.R. James referred to in this presentation:
American
Civilization, ed. by Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart, with an afterword by Robert
A. Hill (London: Basil Blackwell, 1993)
Beyond a Boundary
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and
the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1962)
C.L.R. James's
Caribbean, ed. by Paget Henry and Paul Buhle (Durham: Duke University Press,
1992) The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. by Anna Grimshaw (London: Basil Blackwell,
1992)
C.L.R. James and
Revolutionary Marxism, Selected Writings, 1939-1949, ed. by Scott McLemee and
Paul Le Blanc (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993) ____ with F.
Forest (Raya Dunayevskaya) and Ria Stone (Grace Lee),
The Invading
Socialist Society (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1972) Modern Politics (Detroit:
Bewick Editions, 1973); scheduled to be republished by Humanities Press
"Philosophy of History and Necessity: A Few Words with Professor
Hook," The New International, October 1943
World Revolution
1917-1936, The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press, 1993)
(My thanks to
Paul Buhle, Scott McLemee and Martin Glaberman, who read and commented on
earlier versions of this article, and to participants in the Solidarity summer
school class which was the occasion for its composition.)